Devs Test ETH Withdrawals Ahead of Shanghai Upgrade

In a move that paves the way for activating staked Ether withdrawals, Ethereum’s devs executed the Shapella fork on Wednesday.

The network executed the upgrade at epoch 1350 and finalized at 15:13 UTC. Shapella enabled staked ETH withdrawals on a test network for the first time.

The testnet, called Zhejiang, processed 16 transactions withdrawing staked Ether at the time of writing.

Testnets

Zhejiang is the first of three testnets that will trial the code for Ethereum’s Shanghai and Capella upgrade. Ethereum’s core developers expect the upgrades will take place before May.

“Very cool to see how the UI for withdrawals will look after Shanghai,” tweeted Christine Kim, a researcher at Galaxy.

Developers will deploy the upgrade to the Sepolia testnet in the coming weeks, with Goerli then hosting the final dress rehearsal sometime after.

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The Defiant

Ethereum’s devs recently announced they would prioritize enabling withdrawals with the coming upgrades, pushing other Ethereum Improvement Proposals, including EIP-4844 or proto-danksharding, back until later this year.

Ethereum detractors have criticized the lack of staked Ether withdrawal functionality despite users being able to stake since the Beacon Chain’ launch in December 2020.

While Ethereum’s Proof of Stake consensus layer, the Beacon Chain, went live more than two years ago, it did not merge with the network’s mainnet execution layer until last September.

The upgrade reduced Ethereum’s energy consumption by more than 99.9% by booting Proof of Work miners from the network. It also drove a roughly 90% reduction in the inflation of ETH’s supply.

Supply

Combined with base transaction fees being burned since the EIP-1559 upgrade went live in August 2021, ETH’s supply became deflationary one month after The Merge — meaning that more Ether is removed from supply than are issued to stakers each day

Ethereum’s supply is down by 12,226 ETH or 0.01% since The Merge, according to Ultra Sound Money.

Ethereum is the largest Proof of Stake network with $29.2B or 14% of its circulating supply, according to Staking Rewards.